


unmaking

by auburncursed



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Avada Kedavra, Battle of Hogwarts, Battle of Hogwarts AU, Canon Compliant, Canon Universe, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Death, Deathfic, Doesn't really change canon much tho, Evil Voldemort, Gen, One Shot, Poetic, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Purple Prose, Second War with Voldemort, Short, Short One Shot, Voldemort Dies, slightly AU, what death feels like...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 23:09:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13258560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auburncursed/pseuds/auburncursed
Summary: Through this, the cacophony of voices and tainted fear and the worst and best acts brought from those on the brink of life itself, there are two figures that are not affected. No, they hold their jaws sharp-angled and think of all the wicked things and deeds they have done and seen done, and will and witty escapes and that 'neither shall live while the other survives.'-the choice of splintered destinies that fates a last battle between that twisted thing of a man, a villain who would be king over all, and the boy who had stopped his last rule.[a poetic bit of prose, writing of neverdeath and tom marvolo riddle and an endless span made of mimicries of tomorrow]





	unmaking

It’s over, both of them are the ones who must finish the do-all and end-all of the battle raging through the night, this blood-soaked fondue of corpses and scattered species and blasts of colored light that make anyone and everyone flinch with horror. There is a scream nearby, and a red-headed matron cries in the night for a lost son. Another mother, pregnant with her first child, sputters her life away in a curse of flesh-eating tentacles. Through this, the cacophony of voices and tainted fear and the worst and best acts brought from those on the brink of life itself, there are two figures that are not affected. No, they hold their jaws sharp-angled and think of all the wicked things and deeds they have done and seen done, and will and witty escapes and 'neither shall live while the other survives'.

It matters not the age, or their faces, one flat and slitted, and the other of more lively contour, or even the families and circumstances and moments of cowardly weakness each has endured. There is a prophecy to be done, and that certain ride of motion would not stop for anyone in the world. There is an archetype playing out here, that of a hero and his foe, Gilgamesh defeating a monster and Achilles with his invincibility and bronzed valour slain by such an arrow on his heel: the dual balance and battles of a villain and his opposite, the dark and the light, yin and yang in their eternal struggle for survival.

It is up to them, and it always was. That battle will never stop, to my reckoning. Between a frenzied 'Crucio!' and an answering blast of green death, they meet suddenly, several paces apart.

The man who would be king, twisted into a hard shape of his own making, and the boy, forced into that opposite mold of a peoples' saviour, who had stopped his last rule. For both, that moment seems to reek of fate, and a choice. It is the last hour of Janus' day, May, 1998. There is one door that will close today forever, and one that will remain open. 

Slowly, that sense of doom cautioning death, Voldemort curves his body into a dueller's bow with all that he is- this pale-faced betrayer with translucent flesh webbed over a hairless dome of a head, cold serpentine eyes, laufeyson-like, a soulless one reading yours, red death of the living.

“Care to duel, Tom?” It seems satirical, a parallel parody of forced games and shock in a graveyard, but the Boy Who Lived smiles through gritted teeth and the irony.

Scarlet eyes, crafted inhuman through careful murder and deliberation, flicker with a hint of very well-suppressed anger. “Why of course, Harry…” 

They circle each other, and to the onlookers it is the sinuous dance of dark twins, a bitter taste that they are very much alike, and choice fated them here to be each part's champion. Voldemort's opponent is rather shorter but with a greater magnanimity, forced of struggle and childhood pain, and his ethereal eyes tint a supernatural green of that which took all, and does, in the end. With an ironic twist he bows in turn, clasping his conduit—the wandwood through which he focuses his magic, yet another reminder of their splintered destiny. He bows, black locks rippling over his forehead and the dark scar crushed from his skull by soul's shards looks newly carved into his skin in the dim light. The man who marked him bows back. They walk back one pace—two, three...

The mouth of Tom Marvolo Riddle is pursed in a forbidding line, white and pale shivering and, lead-grim in this day of judgement. As is Hadrian James Potter’s. The time for titles is over, and they face now, sentience to another of its sort. Neither can live while the other survives, and with that soars an echo of tomorrows past. ‘Avada Kedavra!’. The elder wand pulses one, last, time, and the entity that renamed and shaped himself Voldemort shatters to ash and particles of souldust that will soon fade away in the wind.

Falling. It’s interspersed with spiral tunnels, blotches of the dead, and the raw red of reality, colors dimming from other people's stories.

Falling. Again, and a rotund shriek of nothing at all and silent sins he had never counted before in this blank of cold, this forever abyss that he has no senses or thought or belief in, no flame. There is simply numbness, a pervading sense of nothing and never anything at all. He tries to delude himself into something, an idea to cling to for faith and imagined sustenance-warmth, and shelter himself from this onslaught of void. 

Falling. There is nothing, he realizes, to hope or to hate or to be, simply this all-encompassing oblivion.

Falling, but this is not real, and he watches his last senses of himself absorb. He nods to the figure of death with fading recollection and the paleness colors to pink, a mimicry of that being's last laughter in a train station dream with a martyr.

White.


End file.
